[Lexicog] On supposed "double negatives"

[Rudy Troike]

Peter,

     Your recollection is certainly good. This is a much-discussed issue, going
back to Jespersen, who noted that Negatives tended to go through a curious
life-cycle, in which a pre-verbal Negative somehow attracts a post-verbal
Indefinite, which over time comes to be identified as the Negative element,
with the result that the original Negative is gradually dropped. French seems
by all accounts to be in this latter stage, with younger speakers increasingly
omitting the initial "ne".

     "I don't have nothing" is the modern (alas, nonstandard) descendant of King
Alred's and Chaucer's famous "double negatives" (Chaucer said of the Knight:
"He never yet no vileynie ne saide in al his life" -- a triple!, and more if
you count "yet"). Spanish has "No tengo nada" [No have-I nothing], which is
happily standard, and apparently inherited from pre-Classical Latin
(upper-class Latin banished it from social acceptability, which is what
subsequently influenced the rule-makers of upwardly mobile 18th-C. England, who
were desperately anxious for English to be a respectable logical language).

     Russian also has this feature, as I recall, suggesting that it is
reconstructible back to Indo-European. Considerable ink has been spilled
(spilt) of late suggesting that the second "negative" element is actually just
an agreement form, and has no independent semantic force, as otherwise the
familiar dictum that "two negatives make a positive" would indeed apply, as in
(Standard) "I couldn't not go", meaning "I have to go". The use of "anything"
in a negative context by Standard (upwardly-oriented) speakers is, as I see it,
just a "disguised negative form", intended to appear not to be the same as the
"nothing" used by nonStandard speakers.

     I've (randomly) encountered this "agreement" phenomenon in Egyptian Arabic,
where an enclitic pronoun "-ish" (I think) has been recruited for this purpose,
and in Burmese. The underlying psychology that would reproduce this same
structural effect so widely may be rooted in the communicative need to make the
negation clear to a hearer. Why the second element comes to be interpreted as
the primary negator is mysterious.

     In any event, Chinese and Korean make use of indefinites which occur in
both questions and negatives, and with universal quantifiers meaning "all".
Because English lexicalizes these things differently, it is sometimes tempting
to take the English lexicalization as the basis for the interpretation, and
assume that the other language is somehow extending the "basic" meaning,
overlooking the generality of the lexicalized form in the other language and
seeing English as lexically specialized.

     Y'all have a good weekend,

     Rudy


> Message: 2
>    Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:22:05 +0000
>    From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya.org>
> Subject: Re: "something" vs "anything/nothing"
>
> >
> But in some languages there are words in this category which still have
> a negative sense when the negation in the predicate is deleted. A good
> example is "personne" in French, which can mean "person", but means
> "nobody" when following the negative particle "ne", and still means
> "nobody" when "ne" is deleted as for example in a short verbless reply,
> e.g. "Qui vient? Personne" which means "Who is coming? Nobody". At least
> that is what I remember from my rather limited knowledge of French.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter at qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
>
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